Local Mountain Rescue complaing about accidents at Gisburn on NW Tonight

Just seen the piece on the local news, apparently 11 call outs in 10 months is threatening the service the team is able to provide. Ironic that many incidents are dealt with by the Cave Rescue Organisation or the regular emergency services before the MR get there. No mention in the article about the benefits of cycling generally or how many call outs they get for other incidents in the wild. Rather a negative story in the main stream press, shame really, could've been a lot more balanced IMHO.

Lee Quarry is covered by a different team, Rossendale and Pendle MRT. They usually are required to drag the casualty to a fire road (Gisburn has a fairly good network), the ambulance crews don't have the equipment. Project is right though, it's often other riders that stretcher the casualty out.

But seeing as a trail centre has trail roads big enough for ambulances what do they need to be there for.

I've never been to an FC forest that hasn't had barriers preventing the public from liberally driving around the trail roads. I don't think they have a man permanently on every barrier waiting for an ambulance either, but correct me if I'm wrong?.

All the Gisburn access gates have combination padlocks that the emergency services and the mountain rescue team are supposed to have the code for (the MR team have cos I gave it to them when we had a ride around looking at blackspots and access points) or get get hold of with a phone call.

all access gates are usually fitted with emergency keyed alike padlocks, keys are carreied in emergency vehicles for such purposes.

Also if there are a few riders available and a a scoop stretcher why wait for the part time mountain rescyue to appear from their work get to their base and then drive to a location, just to lift somebody out of a forest, when they could be better used where ther eis limited road access like up a mountain.

jon, maybe the info isn't being dealt with appropriately?, maybe the emergency call centre. My understanding is that call centres often default to MRT's when words like rocks, forests, hill, mountain are used in the call out location. In the past I've been told to specify what isn't needed, altho in the heat of moment most people aren't sure.

We were in Clapham 2 weeks ago in the pub just after mountain/cave rescue got there and in the long queue for the bar they mentioned the number of call outs to Gisburn being quite high. The most recent person to have needed them was in a serious condition on Hully Gully. They didn't seem indifferent to a group mountain bikers that had just been out for a ride on a filthy night.

As a club we give as much as we can afford every year to all the mountain rescue services where we ride and the air ambulance.

Yup second the riders stretchering riders, Ive been carried quite a distance by mates and a couple of other riders I've never met when I tried to break my spine. Conversely I've also helped carry a couple of other mates and riders I've never met before who have require stretchering out.

On a couple of occasions the Ambulance crew were wondering if they should call MR to help move the stretcher and the riders present have just just said that they would do it and the ambulance crew have seemed surprised that we would be willing to help.

That's one of the things I love about riding, (generally) one rider will always help another whether they know each other or not.

Glad I didn't bother popping down in the last couple of days - would have had to dodge NW Tonight...

If it was CRO moaning, I'd take a lot more notice.

I don't agree that MR teams will moan about anything - generally they only have a go at people who are very poorly equipped or taking the proverbial. There was a recent case in the Lakes where they rescued the same clueless idiots two nights running, and an MR member suffered a nasty injury in the process. On the whole most teams are made up of outdoor enthusiasts - walkers, climbers, fell runners and bikers.

Looking at Bowland's incident list, you can see they just aren't a busy team - a big chunk of their work appears to be assisting police, looking for vulnerable people. Perhaps the previous relative unpopularity of their area in terms of outdoor activities is the issue, rather than MTB in particular.

Yeah it's not the CRO moaning, in fact the Gisburn head forester who created the trails is part of the CRO. I had a good look at the BPMRT call out log and it's fair to say Gisburn MTB incidents account for a qaurter of their call outs (9 out of 36 this year, not 11 as the Team Leader stated, the other 2 call outs to Gisburn related to kids under 16 getting lost). Of those 9, on 3 occaisions the team were stood down before they got there. In contrast CRO have had 11 mtb incidents at Gisburn out of 63 call outs this year, (for balance Rossendale & Pendle MRT have had 2 MTB callouts out of 41 this year).

Looking at the wording on some of the incident logs on the BRMRT site there's not a lot sympathy for mountain bikers though.